Sloshed, trollied, hammered, plastered. We’ve done a sterling job of inventing words for the inebriated state, but when it comes to judging from their behaviour how much a person has drunk, we could do (a lot) better. That’s according to a review of the literature by US psychologist Steve Rubenzer.

We all have our trusted indices for judging other people’s drunkenness. Perhaps it’s when the eyeballs start floating about as if under the control of a clumsy puppeteer. Or maybe the effusive ‘you know I love you’ delivered with a trickle of dribble. However, the vast majority of studies find that lay people, police officers and bartenders are in fact hopeless at distinguishing a drunk person from a sober one, at least at moderate levels of intoxication. To take just one example, after watching drunk and sober people being interviewed and negotiating a stair case, bartenders rated them as slightly, moderately or very drunk with an accuracy of just 25 per cent.

An international cybercrime investigation is underway into a sophisticated scam network that left a Western Australian man half a million dollars out of pocket when criminals sold his Perth investment property using stolen credentials.

The man, Roger Mildenhall, had been overseas for more than a year when his neighbour informed him that a house of his had been put on the market and was in the process of being sold. Mildenhall then found out that another property of his had already been sold in June.

Mildenhall rushed home and action was taken to stop him losing a second property. The crimes were reported to the police last Friday.

Humans can be unpredictable. Sometimes you think you know the answer to something, and other times you’re completely wrong. It’s weird too- sometimes you can find the answers you’re looking for by using reference tools for learning and sometimes it’s more of a social/psychological answer you can’t find within a book.

Also, it seems like it takes forever to get a question answered, and even then you’re not always satisfied with the answer you received. Does it seem like you still don’t know the true answer to what you were asking? If so, it’s possible that you weren’t asking the correct question in the correct way. It may be time to learn how to ask smart questions, so the answer you get will be the ones you truly need.

Sooooo… how do I learn what questions to ask?

When you come to someone with a question, consider all the issues that surround it. The only way to truly get a complete answer is to ask a thorough question where all of the variables have been considered. For example, be sure to look at:

The person’s background.

The actual knowledge and life experience the person has.

Whether there is any research pertaining to the subject and if the person agrees with it.

Whether prejudice of any kind is involved.

If you’ve asked the question the way you really wanted to.

There are other considerations, but those are a few to get you thinking about how you might ask – and someone might answer – a question. Most of the questions we ask, we don’t really need the answer to. We already know the answer, but we want people to confirm it for us. When they do, we feel better. When they don’t, we get upset and feel like we’re right back at square one.

Open up your eyes and listen as well… the answers are there

When you ask a question, do you actually listen to what the answer is that you’re given? A lot of people don’t. They just feel as though they are supposed to ask questions, but they don’t really care what the other person’s opinion is. While unfortunate, it’s quite common. You don’t need to be one of the people who do this. You can change.

After you’ve thought about your question and decided that it’s one you really do need to ask of others, think about the others in your life. Who would be most likely to know the answer? Whose opinion do you most respect? Is there someone in your circle of friends and family members who has experience with the subject? If you’re considering a divorce, don’t ask your happily-married sister. Ask your aunt who’s been married five times. She’ll have more knowledge of the procedure.

In short, people often feel as though they aren’t getting the right answers when, in truth, they’re getting the answers that are true for the people they’re asking the questions of. When you take the time to formulate the right question and make sure to ask the people who will have the most knowledge to impart to you, you’ll be much more likely to get the answers you need.

I still remember learning from my father how to carefully remove a dipstick to check the oil level in our cars. It was drilled into me — along with turning off the lights when you left a room and clearing the plates off the table after dinner — that oil needs to be changed every 3,000 miles or so.

I’m not sure what I thought would happen if I didn’t, but I vaguely imagined an unlubricated engine grinding to a halt.

Childhood habits are hard to undo, and that’s often good. To this day, I hate seeing an empty room with the lights on.

But sometimes, we need to throw aside our parents’ good advice. In March, for example, I wrote about how we should relearn the dishwasher and laundry soap habits we inherited from our mothers.

This is the DTV Shredder, a militarized skateboard with two caterpillar tracks. It can travel at over 30mph, go up 40-degree slopes, turn around in four feet, and be remotely operated. It’s also quite spectacular in action.

As a maid working in Saudi Arabia, Lahanda Purage Ariyawathie suffered at the hands of her Saudi employer and his wife, who skewered her body with at least 24 nails and needles (pictured). Her case was unusually brutal, but the abuse of domestic workers in the Middle East is all too common.

Huge numbers of migrant domestic workers, mostly from Asia and Africa, are employed throughout the region. Some 1.5m work in Saudi Arabia, 660,000 in Kuwait and 200,000 in Lebanon. Many work very long hours and receive little food, no time off and pay that is a fraction of any minimum wage, if it materialises at all. Human Rights Watch (HRW), a New York-based group, says at least one domestic worker died every week in Lebanon between January 2007 and August 2008. Almost half were suicides and many were as a result of falling from high buildings, often while trying to escape their employers. Mistreatment is so widespread that the Philippines, Ethiopia and Nepal no longer let their citizens go to Lebanon to work as maids, though such bans have had little effect.

Most maids get their jobs through sponsorship systems, so their immigration status is tied to their employer. Employers can repatriate them at will, prevent them from changing jobs and, in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, stop them from leaving the country.